Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 Book

This book is an astounding examination of the Red Army during World War II.

Ms. Merridale examines the prelude: the purges of the officer corps in the late 1930's, the invasion of Poland and the attack on Finland. She examines in detail the disastrous first years of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union. She bases many of her findings on the now newly opened archives and interviews with surviving veterans. But she does not stop there, and realizes the limitations of these; veterans and letters home will not usually speak of executions of Soviet soldiers by their own or of mass rapes.

The Red Army was ruthless in many, many ways and not only to the enemy. In all its battlefield encounters with the Wehrmacht (and the Finnish army) they inevitably lost far more men - either killed or taken prisoner - until the bitter end with the fall of Berlin. This loss of life meant little to the commanders and certainly not to Stalin. But it did to the front-line soldiers - whether he was a regular conscripted recruit or a Gulag prisoner who was designated to take part in a suicidal frontal assault. Ms. Merridale suggests that the Red Army replenished itself twice during the war. Recruits of 1941 seldom lasted more than one or two years, if that.

What united them was "fear", of both the enemy and their own government; and an intense hatred of the invading enemy - Germany. This undying hatred is completely understandable, but it was manipulated as well by the Stalinists'.

The cult of Stalin usurped the glory away from the common soldier. When the tide started to change after the victory at Stalingrad - it was not merely the Red Army and it's woebegone soldiers who were responsible, but also the government with it communist mantra and an overseeing Stalin.

Throughout all this we come away with a vivid picture of a both brutal regime and army. Many soldiers would witness or hear of executions of so-called "shirkers, cowards...". In a speech by Stalin during the war: "After the war, our own people will not forget the ones who honourably served their homeland... [so far so good, but he continues later]... But the names of the coward, the panic monger and the traitor will be pronounced with hatred".

There are several moving quotations from Red Army soldiers. Here is one: "I thought I was a good-hearted person, but it seems that a human being can hide within himself for a long time the qualities that surface only at a time like this". Ms. Merridale explores many of these dark qualities that arise, as the soldier said, at a time of war. The Soviet Union and now Russia, do not want to go that route. They have successfully blocked any attempt to reveal the barbarity of their side, such as the mass rape of women of all ages in Hungary and Germany. To this day they have cloaked the Red Army with an aura of saintliness - even avoiding discussion of the tremendous disasters of the first years of the war. Ms. Merridale delves into all of this history.

This is an eloquently written book and I learnt much about the Red Army and its soldiers - and the epochal event of those years. This book takes us into the cauldron of this awful war, where the Soviets peoples were bravely fighting for their very existence. This book is better than many others I have read on the Soviet perspective of the war years.